CARMEL, N.Y. — The rape case that transfixed Putnam County for more than a year has long been decided, but the feud it incited between the district attorney and the sheriff rages on.

In this suburbanizing but still rustic county of 100,000 an hour north of New York City, Adam Levy, the district attorney, and his partner in fighting crime, Sheriff Donald B. Smith, are now battling each other in opposing $5 million defamation lawsuits stemming from the rape case and subsequent allegations of political retribution and conflicts of interest.

In August 2013, Mr. Levy sued Mr. Smith for accusing him of interfering in the rape investigation. Last May, Mr. Smith sued Mr. Levy, both of whom are Republicans, for calling him “clearly delusional,” “absolutely paranoid” and in declining mental health.

And in recent legal papers in that suit, Mr. Smith, 67, a retired Army brigadier general who has been sheriff since 2001, called Mr. Levy “an individual with numerous personal demons.” He said Mr. Levy was a regular at a strip club in Danbury, Conn., and had “engaged in questionable behavior” with women “in the back of chauffeured limousines.” He also said Mr. Levy had been anointed to run unopposed for district attorney by Vincent L. Leibell III, the former state senator who was a Putnam kingmaker and was convicted in 2010 on federal charges of taking kickbacks.

But the feud began with the rape case. In March 2013, Mr. Smith arrested a friend of Mr. Levy’s on charges of raping a 13-year-old girl. Mr. Levy, the son of Judith Sheindlin, the reality television judge known as Judge Judy, recused himself but was accused of interference after helping his friend with legal expenses and by providing a lawyer — his brother-in-law. Mr. Levy said Mr. Smith made the arrest as retaliation against his efforts to clean up official corruption.

The conflict has rattled many Putnam residents, though elected officials are careful in their responses. Mary Ellen Odell, the county executive, said the two men continued to work together on issues like videoconferencing of prisoners for pretrial hearings as a way of saving on overtime and transportation costs and that Putnam continued to be one of the state’s safest counties.

“Am I happy when I see elected officials slinging mud at each other? Of course not,” Ms. Odell, a Republican, said. “County residents would like to see this resolved. But my sense is that both are continuing to do their jobs professionally.”

When he became district attorney in 2008, Mr. Levy said, he incurred Mr. Smith’s wrath by conducting a series of prosecutions of politically connected government or police officials — a town supervisor, two highway superintendents, a deputy sheriff and a retired police captain.

Officials’ political parties did not factor into his prosecutions, Mr. Levy said. “I didn’t look whether there’s a D or R at the end of your name,” he said. “If you violated the law, you paid the price. Ultimately what we began to see was that residents of Putnam County began to see that everybody was held to the same standard.”

Mr. Levy, in an interview here last week, elaborated on points he had made before, saying the sheriff sought revenge by charging his friend and personal trainer, Alexandru Hossu, with rape after what Mr. Levy said was a slipshod investigation that relied on accusations from a troubled teenager about an event that she said had occurred two years earlier. In April, a Westchester jury found Mr. Hossu not guilty and jurors told reporters that the girl, the daughter of Mr. Hossu’s girlfriend, had not been credible.

“Smith used the individual Hossu for retaliation for my changing the old-boys network here in Putnam County,” Mr. Levy said in the interview.

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Sheriff Donald B. Smith sued the district attorney for calling him “clearly delusional,” “absolutely paranoid” and in declining mental health.CreditAndrew Sullivan for The New York Times

He said the sheriff’s office did not take such routine steps as checking the girl’s phone records, school attendance, Facebook and Twitter postings, and conducting a gynecological exam, all steps that might have raised questions about her accusations.

“Alex Hossu is a perfect case study” of why so many convicted defendants are later exonerated, Mr. Levy said.

In his legal briefs, Mr. Smith has denied Mr. Levy’s accusations. He contends that Mr. Levy continues on the attack because he has been “utterly destroyed in the press” for “his close personal relationship with a criminal defendant” — Mr. Hossu lived with Mr. Levy for several months — and for assisting that defendant with legal advice and lawyer’s expenses “while serving as the district attorney for the very county on which the defendant was being prosecuted.” Mr. Levy has acknowledged spending at least $102,000 of his own money in Mr. Hossu’s defense and bringing in his brother-in-law as Mr. Hossu’s lawyer.

In an interview last week to respond to Mr. Levy’s most recent charges, Mr. Smith, who manages 83 police officers and 57 corrections officers, said it was his office, not Mr. Levy’s, that was leading the battle against political corruption and that brought the very cases that Mr. Levy cited. Because lawyers and law enforcement authorities are barred from discussing the Hossu case, he could not go into detail, but he defended his investigation and said the evidence was sufficient for the Westchester County district attorney to prosecute.

“There is no feud on my part,” Mr. Smith said. “I’m the one being attacked. He has the money and the P.R. machine and I don’t.”

Mr. Levy said the strip club accusation refers to a time in the late 1990s when he was a private lawyer and the club’s owner was a client, and said he had no idea what Mr. Smith was referring to about his conduct in limousines.

Mr. Levy, who faces re-election in 2015, has been criticized by some ethics experts like Bennett L. Gershman, a professor at Pace Law School in White Plains, for aiding a suspect while serving as district attorney, even though he turned the prosecution over to the Westchester County district attorney’s office when he recused himself.

In the interview, Mr. Levy defended his actions, saying that once he turned the case over, he was “John Q. Citizen” and could help his friends however he saw fit.

“Did it look good for me politically? Of course not,” he said. “But I was more interested in seeing justice was served. I put my political future on the line.”

He denied leaking secret investigative information, as Mr. Smith has charged. He also said that he was being sardonic when he advised Mr. Hossu’s original lawyer, Robert Altchiler, to contact the foreman of the grand jury that indicted Mr. Hossu to find out if there was prosecutorial misconduct. He said he made the suggestion to get Mr. Altchiler off his back.

Mr. Altchiler said that Mr. Levy was trying to “spin” what happened and produced an email to show that Mr. Levy reached out to him and made the suggestion in all seriousness.

“I was the hunted, not the hunter,” Mr. Altchiler said. “There was no sarcasm. I got that email as a former prosecutor and defense lawyer and he, as he district attorney of Putnam County, suggested I invade the secrecy of the grand jury. You can’t spin that.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: A Rape Case Ends With an Acquittal, but the Legal Feud It Incited Endures. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe